Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION Puppet: configuration management made easy
VIRTUALISATION Puppet: configuration management made easy | Puppet: configuration management made easy |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 28 April 2009 | |
|
Page 5 of 5 Turnbull says on the downside, when Puppet was originally written all of the communication used XML-RPC "and it does have some performance problems, mostly due to the speed at which things happen, particularly large scale file-serving in large environments. It does take a while to run the configuration. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
But things will soon be better. "The next release of Puppet, which is 0.25, starts to replace all of the XML-RPC with REST API web services. Now we've discovered that that's substantially faster." Puppet is an open source project and the founder, Kanies, runs a company called Reductive Labs which does consulting and support contracts and some custom development work. A Windows port of Puppet is under way, the delay in such a project getting off the ground being simply because nobody had a need to port it over. "Someone's contributed some code. We've got a developer who has an itch to scratch on that base. And he said, 'look, here's my first code of this', and we've been able to look at the code for the last couple of weeks, and we've pretty happy with the code. It's sort of a bit easier because it doesn't change a lot of the core Puppet code." Turnbull says changing Puppet for Windows is actually not a huge step because it's more about supporting the waiting configuration and resource types on Windows, than it is about changing the raw code. "It's not a substantial change to us, which means it's relatively easy to get in. And we're very keen on tests in the project. We've got a very big test suite. No code goes in, hopefully, without tests." Due to his involvement in Puppet, Turnbull has become something of a coder as well. "I'm not a developer by trade but I find myself doing more and more development. Luke is trying to turn me into a developer, not very successfully. I don't have the time to do largescale development, between work and various other things. but I do a lot of little fixes and that expands your knowledge and slowly the number of fixes grows. I think probably my primary interest is that I need to know enough to be able to understand a patch. I need to know where it goes and how to test it and that's always good, to keep your brain active and learn something new." Turnbull is getting ready to release a second edition of his book, Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy. He proposed the topic to Apress because though configuration management has been around a while, it's starting to get a bit of hype, particularly since the talks about cloud computing has gathered steam. |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
